by Dudley Pope
He considered the possibility that another of the King's ships might sight the brig and take her in tow, but there was little hope of that: any ship within a week's sailing of this position was likely to be in as much trouble as the Triton, if not more. Nor were they now on any regular convoy track. Not even a privateer would come this way. The thought of a privateer brought him up with a start. It'd be a proud privateer that returned with the Topaz in tow. It would take practically no effort to capture her now, only patience. Wait for the weather to ease up, and then board her. Nor would the Triton be much more difficult; raking her by sailing across her bow and stern and staying out of the arcs of fire of her broadside guns...
Southwick was back on deck by five o'clock and cheerfully commenting on the speed with which the wind was dropping. The cloud was breaking up overhead, and the sea was easing slightly.
"Seems it goes quicker than it arrives!" Southwick said.
Ramage nodded. "I don't think the eye was in the centre."
"Couldn't have been, sir. It's cleared in - how long?" He scratched his head, a puzzled look on his face.
"Damned if I know," Ramage admitted. "We lost the masts about ten hours ago, I suppose. The hurricane began - hell fire, I can't remember. What day is it?"
Southwick shook his head helplessly. "We'll have to sit down and work it out, sir - and make up the entries for the log ..."
By midnight the wind had dropped to a fresh breeze, stars were visible overhead through breaks in the cloud, and the seas were easing, although still running high. A muster of the ship's company showed four men missing, presumably lost when the brig broached. Considering the size of the waves and the speed with which it all happened, Ramage knew he had been lucky not to lose more. Six men killed by the Peacock and four by the hurricane.
Southwick, pleasantly surprised that only four had been lost, said cheerfully: "Think of it as fifty-one survivors, sir!"
Chapter Ten
Stafford was the first man to sight land a few moments before noon three days after the eye had passed. With all the watch gathered round and cheering, Ramage presented him with a guinea prize.
The Cockney, in his usual breezy way, spun the coin and kissed it for luck and said to Ramage: "Permission to ask a question, sir?"
Ramage nodded, although guessing the question would probably verge on impertinence.
"Did you ever reckon you'd 'ave ter pay, sir?"
When Ramage looked puzzled, Stafford explained: "We was in the eye of the 'urricane when you said you'd present a guinea ter 'ooever saw land first. Didn't seem much chance we'd live long enough fer that, sir."
Ramage decided that it was not the time to tell the ship's company that the offer of a guinea prize was all he could think of to cheer them up when things looked desperate. Instead he just smiled knowingly at Stafford and said: "I even guessed where the land would be!"
Stafford looked startled. "Cor - where is it, sir?"
"One of the Virgin Islands."
"Virgins, sir? Wot, 'ere?"
Stafford's surprise was genuine and apparently shared by the rest of the men.
"Yes, several," Ramage said, without a smile. "British and Danish. No French or Spanish."
"No French or Spanish! D'yer 'ear that!" Stafford poked Rossi in the ribs. "Nor no Eyetalian virgins, either!"
Ramage gestured to Jackson: "Right, now; make a signal to the Topaz - Land in sight to the north-west."
The Topaz acknowledged it promptly, and Ramage saw Southwick hunched over the compass.
Ramage walked over to take bearings of each end of the island. Radiating out from where the compass box was fastened to the deck, and looking like the spokes of a wheel, a series of thin grooves had just been cut in the deck planking, the thickest corresponding to the fore and aft line. It was Southwick's idea and was a crude pelorus: it allowed a rough bearing to be taken without lifting up the compass.
Ramage picked up the slate from its new stowage on the forward side of the starboard aftermost carronade slide, and after checking the time wrote: "12.03 p.m. Sighted one of Virgin Islands NW X W½W, distant about twelve miles."
"Let's have a cast of the log," Ramage told Appleby. Ten minutes later, as the Master's mate supervised the men stowing the reel again, he noted the Triton's speed and the course being steered:
"Speed 1½ knots, course north, wind south, fresh."
No log entry could describe seas that were no longer monstrous, clouds that no longer warned of unbelievable winds and rain the like of which few men ever saw and lived to describe. No log entry could tell how happy men were just to be alive, even though their ship was almost helpless, driven forward only by the pressure of the wind on the hull.
He looked over on the starboard quarter where the Topaz lumbered along, a great ox splashing through a muddy lane. She still looked smart, even without masts, bowsprit or jibboom. If spars suddenly went out of fashion, the Topaz would rate as an elegant ship. For that matter masts have gone out of fashion, he reminded himself, at least around here.
Landfalls were curious: one usually waited days, if not weeks; but once the low grey shape - it always was a low grey shape - was spotted, it became a matter of the greatest urgency to identify it. This was no exception: St Croix stretched for more than thirty miles athwart their course: they could pass either east or west of it to make for one of the other islands beyond. But if it was, say, Virgin Gorda, then they had to get to the westward quickly before they ran on to the reefs littering that end of the islands.
"You're smiling, sir," Southwick, who had just come on deck, said: "St Croix?"
"Virgins," Ramage said. "I was thinking that Columbus must have been in a whimsical mood when he passed through those islands and named them."
"How so?"
"Virgin Gorda, up to the east. It would have been the first of them he sighted. It means 'The Fat Virgin'!"
"He'd been at sea a long time?" Southwick suggested.
"No, not at that point, but the islands were being sighted thick and fast."
"Puerto Rico," Southwick said. 'That does mean 'Rich Port', doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"But why name a whole island 'Rich Port'?"
"He didn't - so the story goes: it was a mistake made in Madrid."
"How come, sir?"
"Because he sighted the island on St John's Day he named the island 'San Juan' after him. Then he found a deep bay on the north coast - a perfect natural harbour, and the soil was obviously rich. So he named the harbour 'Puerto Rico'."
"Ah," Southwick exclaimed, slapping his knee, "so when he reported back, some clerk got 'em mixed up!"
When Ramage nodded, the Master said: "But why have they never put it right?"
"The mistake probably arose in Court - Columbus reported directly to the King. Either the King did not notice the mistake, or would not draw attention to it later."
'"I can't see anyone pointing it out to him, either!"
"Well, whatever happened it's been that way for three hundred years!"
Southwick pulled out his watch, looked first at the grey smudge ahead and then at the Triton's wake, and sniffed disapprovingly. "Thirty minutes. Hasn't exactly leapt up over the horizon."
"We're not exactly galloping towards it!"
In an hour he'd know whether they would pass the eastern or western end. Two things could upset the calculations - a strong west-going current, and easterly winds: both would push the Triton and Topaz to the westwards. They needed the present southerly wind to continue, but it was an unusual wind. Almost certainly, once the effect of the hurricane had worn off, it would fly back to the eastern quadrant; the Trades would return.
An hour later Southwick took another bearing of the eastern end of St Croix. Even before he plotted it on the chart, Ramage knew they had no choice: they would pass the western end because the current was setting the Triton down to the west.
When he marked it on the chart, drawing in the Triton's track for the last hour, it wa
s increasingly obvious that it was going to be a struggle even to keep up to the east enough to be sure of making St Thomas, thirty miles beyond St Croix. To the westward of St Thomas, some seventy miles away, was Puerto Rico. Ramage had no wish to spend even a few weeks, let along months or years, in a Spanish prison...
Back on deck Southwick was pacing up and down and Ramage wondered what had angered him. Before he noticed the Captain had come up the companionway, the Master bent over the compass again, his eye travelling along one of the grooves in the deck planking and over the bow to the eastern end of St Croix. Then he saw Ramage.
"Should never have lost all the spars," he said wrathfully. "Not to be able to set up any sort of jury rig. Who'd have thought we'd have nothing left?"
"We couldn't have saved anything," Ramage said mildly. "I was damned glad to see it all go. I'd no wish to see a topmast surfing itself through our hull planking like a swordfish and sinking us."
"Well, no, sir, but if only we could set a stitch of canvas now we would weather the eastern end of that damned island. As it is, we'll be hard put to have it still in sight as we pass to the westward."
"No matter what jury rig you could contrive, Mr Southwick, don't forget you'd have to make a duplicate for the Topaz..."
"By jingo, yes! We couldn't leave her!"
"Well, then," Ramage said, shrugging his shoulders.
"But it doesn't stop me wanting to keep up to the eastward," Southwick said stubbornly. "It's only natural. All my life I've been trained never to lose an inch to leeward."
"Me too," Ramage said sarcastically. "I joined the same Navy. But we aren't trying to get the weather gage of a French squadron." "True, sir. By the way, we opened another cask of salt pork today. Six pieces short."
Ramage nodded and knew Southwick's mood of depression had passed. When the Master mentioned such mundane things, all was well.
All was well, and some dishonest contractor to the Admiralty had made his usual illicit extra profit, by filling the cask with brine and a few pieces of salt pork less than the number he painted on the outside giving the alleged contents.
It was sometimes hard to think of the Navy as a fighting force, Ramage reflected; it seemed to be an enormous organization where contractors - whether supplying salt pork or beef, timber from the Baltic, rum from the West Indies, butter and dried pease, shirts for the pursers to sell or flax for the sails - made great profits selling items which were underweight or of poor quality.
If the contractors had to sell their wares in the market-place, he thought bitterly, they'd starve. As it is they wax fat, presumably quietly paying the percentages required to ensure Navy Board officials look the other way, and attend banquets where they drink bumpers to the damnation of the French. In the meantime ship after ship, week after week, recorded in the log such entries as "Opened cask of beef marked 151 pieces, contained 147."
Now the spare tiller had been shipped on top of the rudder head, steering was a good deal easier. Certainly the long tiller sweeping across the after deck cut down the space the commanding officer had to walk, but he wasn't so sure whether, for a vessel of this size, the tiller wasn't really better than the wheel anyway.
The Italian seaman, Rossi, was taking a spell at the tiller with the coloured man, Maxton.
"No luff to watch," Ramage said.
"Does make no difference, sir," Rossi said.
"How so?"
"Habit, sir. All the time I keep looking here or here" - he pointed to where the luff of the mainsail would be on either tack with the wind close hauled - "just as though the masts they still stand."
"No big t'ing, sir," Maxton said as if apologizing for Rossi's grumbling, and Ramage smiled to himself: it was a favourite West Indian expression. "But," Maxton confessed, "I keep forgetting and frightening myself when I see the masts are gone."
"You'll get used to it," Ramage said dryly.
"Do we ...' Rossi stopped, embarrassed that he'd begun to ask a question, but continued after Ramage nodded. "Are we making for that island, sir?"
"No. We pass as close as we can. It has no harbours or bays we can use. We want another one north of it. Thirty miles beyond."
By nightfall St Croix was several miles to the east of them and with the night glass Ramage could just make out the high land behind Frederiksted, at the western end of the island. During the late afternoon they'd found the current sweeping athwart their course not only pushing them inexorably to the westward but increasing in strength the closer they got to St Croix. It was presumably the sea pouring into the Caribbean from the Atlantic through the Anegada Passage - there was a reference to it in the sailing directions. And it meant their progress was crabwise; a diagonal resulting from the south wind pushing them north and the current pushing them west.
Ramage was woken at four o'clock next morning: a wind change, the quartermaster reported. As he struggled into his clothes he reflected that any change could only be for the worse: the best wind for them was the one they'd had, from the south.
The deck was a vast and empty expanse in the darkness with a small group of men aft, by the tiller, and three or four men - the lookouts - up forward.
"It's backing, sir," Southwick said gloomily. "Dropped a bit and backed to south-east-by-south. The way it did it, I reckon it'll go round more."
Ramage pictured the chart in his mind. By now, the northwestern corner of St Croix should be on the starboard quarter, St Thomas dead ahead, and the small island of Vieques, with Puerto Rico massive behind it, on the larboard beam.
Between St Thomas and Vieques, away to the north-west, was an island marked on the chart as "Snake or Passage Island", one end of a long line of coral cays reaching westward to Puerto Rico. But from St Thomas to Puerto Rico the sea was a mass of reefs, islands and rocks. In daylight, properly rigged, it was no great problem; at night a safe passage through there would be virtually impossible, whether one had masts or not...
If the wind went any more to the east they'd have no choice anyway. Without the means of steering, apart from making slight changes either side of the direction that the wind carried them, if they had to go through that passage they were done for. Avoiding the long and often unexpected reefs - for the charts were rudimentary - would mean tacking or wearing round, and probably beating to windward, and these were manoeuvres which were part of the past for both the Triton and the Topaz.
"We can only do our best," Ramage said to Southwick. "Same as before - keep up to the east as best you can."
He looked astern for the Topaz. That was one of the advantages of the Tropics - unless there was rain, it was very rarely completely dark. Almost always there was enough light to give a hint of land, or some other ship, at a useful distance.
The Topaz was on the same bearing and finding the same wind shift. So be it. Since he could do nothing about it, whether the wind backed, veered or went flat, he was going to get some sleep; he had been reminded of the dangers of the lack of it a few days ago.
He was woken again shortly before dawn when the ship's company went to quarters, and found it oddly comforting that he had not given the order to get rid of the guns after the ship broached: the Triton might not have masts, but no privateer would come alongside with impunity.
As daylight rolled back the horizons, Ramage was relieved to see that they had managed to stay up enough to the east to have St Thomas ahead, but frightened by the bewildering number of islands almost all round them, all with outlying coral reefs and shoals of rocks.
"Hopeless trying to identify them," he said to Southwick. "We need to spread out the chart and then mark 'em off!"
He sent Jackson down to the cabin to fetch it and stared at St Thomas again with the telescope.
"Like Tuscany," Ramage commented to Southwick, gesturing towards St Thomas.
"Dull," Southwick said. "Not a patch on Grenada."
Grenada and Martinique were Southwick's favourite Caribbean islands. He hated St Lucia because it was a wet island with an oppressive,
sullen atmosphere and Antigua because it was arid and mosquito-ridden. On balance, Ramage agreed with his assessment.
Jackson arrived with the chart and at a gesture from Ramage spread it out on the deck, holding it down to prevent it rolling up again.
"Right," Ramage said. "St Thomas is dead ahead," jabbing a finger down on the chart. "Hmm - Puerto Rico looks a big lump!"
Over on the larboard beam they could see a large cone-shaped mountain which was the centre of a range at the east end of the island.
Ramage traced it on the chart. "Ah yes - El Yunque, 'The Anvil'. It looks tall enough!"
Southwick pointed to a nearer island almost in line with it. "Is that Vieques?"
"Yes, long on the chart, but looks deceptively short from this angle," Ramage said.
He slowly turned to the right. "That'll be Snake Island with all these little islands and cays round it - north of Vieques. You can just see it. Now look at the chart - see all these reefs - how they stretch on to Puerto Rico in a long line?"
Southwick measured, using two fingers as dividers. "Why, there's fifteen miles of them! The Cordilleras Reefs. And look at the rocks at the end. What does 'Las Cucarachas' mean?"
"The cockroaches."
"Damned odd name." He looked round the horizon. "Ah, that's Sail Rock!" He pointed to a curiously shaped island sticking starkly up from the sea and, white in the sunlight, looking in the distance like a ship under sail.
Ramage took the slate and said brusquely: "Let's have some bearings noted down, please."
"Sorry, sir," Southwick said. "I got carried away!"
Even if the wind did not back any more, Ramage thought they would not reach St Thomas because of this west-going current sweeping towards the reefs round Snake Island. Maybe they'd only miss St Thomas by a mere couple of miles and take their chance among Savana Island, Kalkfin Cay, Dutchcap Cay, Cockroach Cay and Cricket Cay.